Stay classy, Greg Abbott

A Twitter poster who called Wendy Davis an “idiot” and “retard Barbie,” and said Greg Abbott would demolish her in the governor’s election, got a thank-you from Abbott’s campaign also via Twitter.

The exchange prompted a flurry of people on Twitter to suggest that Abbott should have refuted the offensive language instead of giving a shout out to the poster.

The poster, @jefflegal, frequently comments on political events and ridicules liberals. He had little patience for those who criticized his name-calling. He said he was using irony and “loved hearing complaints from liberals.”

Nor, apparently, will he condemn such language – and remember, even Sarah Palin considers the word “retarded” to be offensive. Look, Greg Abbott isn’t responsible for what a troglodyte like that has to say, but once he engages with him like that, it’s fair game. Abbott could have easily ignored him – it’s not like being tweeted at demands a response – but if he does choose to respond, the nature of his response, and what wasn’t said, is open to scrutiny. I will simply note that one of the keys to a Wendy Davis victory next year is a nice, big gender gap. It’s fine by me if Abbott and his Barbie-obsessed Twitter supporters keep on doing their best to make that happen.

One more thing, from this Trib story about the perils of candidates/officeholders doing unsupervised tweeting:

An Abbott source who spoke on condition of anonymity said the attorney general did not read the full message (and in particular, the offensive language) before expressing his gratitude.

What, was the tweet too long for him to make it all the way to the end? Maybe Twitter needs to reconsider that 140 character limit. Texas Politics, BOR, and dKos have more.

I don’t believe Abbott didn’t read the whole tweet all the way through. In his reply, he added the right-wing hashtag #TGDN to it — echoing the use of that hashtag by the original poster in the original tweet. #TGDN stands for “Twitter Gulag Defense Network”. Hashtags don’t automatically generate themselves, so Abbott had to read all the way through that loser’s tweet in order to see the #TGDN hashtag at the end of it, and then add it himself manually to his reply. Looking through Abbott’s Twitter timeline, he hasn’t added #TGDN to any of his other tweets. That hashtag was intentional, and he did read the original tweet all the way through, IMO, and then he gave the nod to the original poster by using that guy’s hashtag.

We’ll be seeing much more of this type of name-calling if Wendy runs. The right wing has a long history of calling us “libtards”, so this is nothing new, of course. As for Sarah Palin, let’s not forget that she ranted and got on her high horse when Rahm made a comment calling some group “retarded”, but then she defended Rush Limbaugh when he called liberals retarded: